Moto Guzzi MGS-01 - Cooking Goose

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Booming Italian twin-cylinder trackday terrors have generally been the specialty of Ducati over the last 30 years; you might picture the odd orange Laverda parallel twin thrown in when that company is flirting with solvency, but generally Ducati is the go-to Latin track machine. Rarely do you picture a big, air-cooled, transverse V-twin out of Mandello de Lario thundering out of a corner and scything past the opposition. Moto Guzzi generally presents an air of staunch traditionalism, a sort of Italian BMW that is somehow more passionate than the Munich brand but far more rational than the exuberant offerings from Bologna. Guzzi riders are weathered, skilled old men who thump along the backroads, do their own repairs, and generally abstain from high-speed shenanigans. Or at least that’s the stereotype, one that was briefly blown into the weeds by the spectacularly uncharacteristic MGS-01 Corsa.

NCR Millona - The Ultimate Ducati Pantah

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Last week I profiled one of the ultimate bevel-head Ducatis, the Vee Two Alchemy SV-1. This week, it’s time for the Pantah’s revenge.

In the modern age of higher and higher horsepower outputs and electro-trickery keeping us out of the ditch and on the good side of the EPA, there are certain riders who pine for a simpler formula for performance. These folks are a special kind of luddite, purists who wants a raw and uncompromised sport machine. It isn’t that they desire a return to a prior (maybe inferior) era – it’s that they want their thrills in pure, undistilled format. They want minimal weight and a broad spread of power in a perfectly tuned chassis.